Teleconferencing has become increasingly popular as a means to reduce travel expense and enhance collaboration between people from distributed geographic locations. In a large teleconference room there may be any number of microphones.
In conventional systems, when one microphone is muted, all of the microphones are muted and no audio is emitted. Rather than muting all audio, a user may want to mute just their microphone, so that they can have a side conversation, for example. However, the sound of the user's voice may leak into other microphones in the room. This may result in people thinking that they cannot be heard, when in fact, other microphones pick up their voice and transmit it over the teleconference.
Corresponding reference characters indicate corresponding parts throughout the several views of the drawings.